Netflix Study Reveals What Episode Gets You “Hooked” On A Show, But How Much Time Will It Take To Get You There?

At the Emmy Awards last week, host Andy Samberg’s opening monologue included a star-studded musical number that poked fun at the major struggle TV fans have during this era of “peak TV”: how to find time to watch everything. His solution? Holing up in a “binge bunker” and catching up on every series known to man. (The Emmys would later “solve” this issue with their spoiler montage that pissed off the entire universe.)

While the joke is most certainly on us — really, there’s no reason we should feel the need to catch up on weeks and months worth of television — Netflix released the results of a new study last week about our collective streaming behavior. Just in time for fall TV and an onslaught of new series and season premieres, the study purports to outline exactly when their members “get hooked” on their 25 most-watched programs (encompassing both Netflix Originals and acquired series). The key takeaway? None of us seem to stick with a show — drama, comedy, or supernatural — based solely on its pilot.

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For those of you that aren’t visual thinkers, here’s what that chart means. It took viewers (spanning 16 different territories, including the U.S.) just two episodes to decide to complete the first seasons of Breaking Bad, Bates Motel, and Sons of Anarchy,but series you might deem more accessible to wider audiences in fact took more episodes to keep viewers interested. Long-running CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, Disney-inspired fantasy soap Once Upon a Time, and NBC’s go-to crime drama The Blacklist all took six or more episodes to hook subscribers.

What does Netflix mean by “hooked”? Well, they define “hooked” as such: The point at which 70% of viewers go on to complete the first season of the show¹. (It should be noted that Netflix did not outline a timeframe for how long it took for viewers to get to the hooked episode or complete the first season, nor did it release any data about how many viewers started watching a show and then dropped off prior to this point).

One of the interesting findings is that dramas like Dexter, Sons of Anarchy, and Suits hook audiences earlier on than comedies, suggesting that while dramas require much more of our time, comedies like Grace and Frankie, BoJack Horseman, or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (all Netflix Originals, mind you) may be more of an acquired taste. Although, to be fair, four to five episodes of said comedies — the amount it took for viewers to “get hooked” — are roughly the equivalent of two and a half episodes of a dramatic runtime, the same amount of time it takes to stick with a drama, as shown below.

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We reached out to Netflix with some questions after they first released this study last week, and a representative explained to us that researchers didn’t notice any differences between how viewers watched dramas as opposed to comedies. “We anecdotally found,” the rep explains, “that ‘hooked points,’ were different and varied regardless of the type of show — comedy vs. drama — or the number of episodes. The ‘hooked point’ was determined by the content itself.” In short, Netflix is looking at these shows independent of one another even though only four comedies were included in the 25 shows analyzed.

Our own analysis of Netflix’s data led us to conclude that, of the 25 aforementioned researched shows, it doesn’t necessarily take longer for viewers to get hooked on comedies, per se, but it takes a few more episodes to convince us to stick with them. We also found that broadcast dramas in particular, not only require more episodes to “get hooked,” but also beg more of what we’re calling Invested Time (measured in minutes) when compared to cable and Netflix Original dramas. We slightly adjusted Netflix’s original graphic (in red) to show you (in blue) how much Invested Time you’re spending as compared to the number of episodes you’re watching. Of the twelve series shown on Netflix’s original chart, it’s somewhat deceiving to say that it takes the longest to get hooked on How I Met Your Mother; in fact, when you factor in Invested Time, it actually takes the longest to get hooked by Don Draper of Mad Men and Charlie Cox of Marvel’s Daredevil.

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Also, it’s worth mentioning that Bates Motel gets people hooked very quickly! Of all the data that Netflix released, that show took the least amount of Invested Time to get viewers thirsting for more of Norman and Norma’s, um, adventures.

We also looked at the Rotten Tomatoes score of each series and concluded that the critics’ rating of a given show doesn’t necessarily matter in terms of how “hookable” it is and can’t predict whether or not a viewer will complete a critically praised series’ season. Broadcast drama Arrow, for example, has a 95% critics score on the Tomatometer but took eight episodes — that’s over five and a half hours — to get audiences to stick with it. And if Netflix’s data is correct, roughly 30% of those viewers didn’t finish Season One. That’s a lot of time to waste, essentially, on a “great” show.

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Speaking of that 30% percent, Netflix’s study begs questions about the math behind giving up on a series and we aren’t the only ones who noticed. The data provided does not include what we’ll call the “dropping off point,” or the point at which viewers decided enough was enough and gave up on a series. When we asked Netflix about this, the representative Decider spoke to explained this research “only looked at the ‘hooked’ points.” We might be allowing ourselves to get hooked on a show, but if we feel we’re no longer receiving the same escapism a series once brought us, chances are we don’t complete seasons.

Nevertheless, amidst this era of peak TV, it’s interesting being able to begin to quantify how we’re watching shows in the digital age, even if this specific study seems to pose more questions than it answers (which, we will admit, is a tough thing to do when it comes to analyzing a creative entity like TV). In addition to delving into viewers’ dropping off points, it would be interesting to see what kind of results this research approach would present across all series available on Netflix (not to mention those on other platforms!) through analyzing a much wider range of series that also include notoriously addictive reality TV series and other various subgenres: supernatural, documentary, news, and so on. Who knows? As more consumers turn to streaming for their TV fix in the future, we might see studies about the exact minute we get hooked on series, instead of an episode estimate.